Tech bros are upfront with what they want in life: a wife, four kids, and AGI. How they’ll get there is less certain.
Over the course of our Tech Bro 2.0 project, in which we spoke to nearly two dozen young male founders, one problem emerged repeatedly. Although the vast majority want the strangely specific number of four children, they are single, grind more than 80 hours a week, and aren’t on dating apps. Many can’t name a single bar or club they frequent, or a single hobby they have outside of work.
When we asked one 25-year-old tech bro if polyamory is still in vogue in tech, he said, “I think there’s a very small percentage that are even amorous at all.”
Inside the lives of Silicon Valley’s young hustlers
Even as founders flood back to San Francisco, cramming into hacker houses and working on their products 12 hours a day, six days a week, many seem lonelier than ever. To get insights into the tech bro dating experience, we spoke to matchmakers, female investors, and tech bros and gals.
While many of the city’s founders and engineers dream of big families, they spend more time sweet-talking ChatGPT than on dates. “I probably talk to LLMs like 10 times more than I talk to people,” joked Jake Adler, 21, founder of defense biotech startup Pilgrim.
Tech Bro 2.0 Live Panel Discussion
Thursday, Nov. 6 at Manny's join us for a candid conversation about how young men are shaping and experiencing Silicon Valley in the age of AI.
Some of this is reflective of Gen Z at large. According to a Forbes health survey, (opens in new tab) 79% of Gen-Zers report feeling burned out from dating apps, and a recent Gallup poll showed that a quarter of all U.S. men (opens in new tab) between 15 and 34 feel lonely.
Lucie Ebnerova, a Bay Area matchmaker, said fewer men have attended her singles events (opens in new tab) in recent months. “We would love to have them,” she said. “We have beautiful women.”
While some analysts attribute (opens in new tab)Gen Z’s loneliness issues to poor financial prospects and technology-induced isolation, founders and investors told us that, in San Francisco, it’s often motivated by a desire to grind while the going’s still good. Ebnerova said she attended an AI-related event with more than 500 men, none of whom “struck a conversation with me.”
“Everybody feels a sense of urgency,” said Masha Bucher, founding partner of Day One Ventures. “Some of my friends are pronouncing, like, ‘I’m not looking to marry until after AGI.’”
Annie Liao, founder of e-learning platform Build Club, said there’s a feeling that no one should date until their Series A or B, when they can delegate more time to life’s other pursuits. “You don’t want to let down stakeholders,” she said.
Optimizing love
More precise than picking someone up at a nightclub, founders approach dating like running a startup, with a laser focus on “optimization” and “return on investment,” according to Amy Andersen, a matchmaker for tech elites.
One founder said she has an investor pipeline, a sales pipeline, and “a dating pipeline which is mostly sourced from Bumble or Hinge.”
As for the size of the dating portion, “top of the funnel’s probably a couple of thousand by now,” she said.
Like they do with everything else, founders are incorporating AI into their relationship workflows. Nathalie Gouailhardou, cofounder of Neurode, asked ChatGPT to analyze her exes’ text messages. “I was like, Oh, do it from an attachment theory point of view! Do it from an Esther Perel style point of view,” she said. “It was so interesting.”
Liao watched a friend create an AI algorithm to optimize his Hinge profile, leading to four times as many matches. “I have yet to see him close the deal though,” she said.
Of course, this calculated approach can be a dating turnoff. One founder sent a date his Calendly link to streamline their scheduling. She canceled using the “reschedule” feature. “A word of advice to my fellow technology brothers: Don’t use schedulers ever with anyone whom you’re romantically [dating],” he said.
Beneath the rampant workaholism, tech bros also have a vulnerability problem: When funding and attention naturally flow to the most puffed-out chests, no founder wants to let their guard down long enough to find love.
If a founder goes through a rough breakup, for example, they’re afraid their peers would “take it as a sign that my company is not doing well, or I’m being distracted,” Bucher said. “It could cause not raising the next round, or not hiring XYZ. A lot of this lives in people’s heads.”
Miranda Nover, 26, cofounder of health wearables startup Fort, said women founders, too, have fears, including the “reputational damage” of dating another founder.
She worries that she might be known only as someone’s girlfriend. “It wouldn’t be conducive to me establishing myself as a founder in my own right,” she said.
Late start
For female founders, this fear has been amplified by the macho-ification of the tech bro and his recent embrace of more traditional values — or at least the idealization of pro-natal parents pumping out babies. Elon Musk, whom many of the bros list as their idol, talks incessantly about the need to have kids. “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” he tweeted (opens in new tab) in 2022.
Gouailhardou said she’s seen the tech bros around her become more conservative; she has yet to meet one who answers “yes” when asked if he’s a feminist. She said Silicon Valley men want to date ambitious women “but then want lifestyles that are not going to allow an ambitious woman to achieve her dreams.”
But the many tech bros we spoke to said they’ve met female founders who are equally obsessed with procreation. One woman is trying to turn her stem cells into sperm “to actually impregnate men with her sperm” and “have 100 children.” Asked for details, she said the science is “super early” — too early to speak about with a journalist.
Jayden Clark, 27, cofounder of Gecko, a platform for rental businesses, said a girl he dated told him he deserved three wives because “I can bench press so much.” “I thought she was joking, but she wasn’t,” he said. “She wants sister wives to bear more children.”
“Seemed like a great deal on the surface,” he joked. “Not my thing.”
Andersen said Silicon Valley runs on a well-worn romantic playbook: Techies punt dating until they’ve made a fortune. But in their late 30s or 40s, they’ll have an “aha moment,” where they wake up and say, “Oh, wow, I’m really successful, and I want to find my match. How do I even do that?”
But Liao said there’s no rush for anyone, regardless of gender, to start a family. “A lot of my girlfriends are in their 30s, and to be honest, a lot of them are just freezing eggs.”
Gouailhardou agreed: “I think I would do IVF even if I wasn’t gonna have four kids, so that I can have time and not have to worry.”
Bucher said IVF and surrogacy have become standard among Silicon Valley women older than 35 who want to have successful careers and avoid a high-risk pregnancy. “I’ve never heard about so many people planning to hire a surrogate,” she said.
Basically, this generation of tech bros and gals is nowhere near ready to settle down, but they’re not worried.
One 25-year-old AI founder said he wants seven kids, then shrugged. “I gotta find my first girlfriend.”